March To Remember

The two-week trip to Nazi concentration camp sites in Poland during Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is not exactly a vacation.

Some 200 high school students from Broward and Palm Beach counties who are planning to join the "March of the Living" from April 13-28 may not be looking forward to it, though.

However, they feel they should retrace the "march of death" by Jews from the Auschwitz to Birkenau camps.

The students recently attended a meeting to learn more about the international educational excursion that draws about 6,000 teens worldwide every two years.

Now, they have different reasons for wanting to go on the march.

-- "We're going as representatives for people who can't go," said Matt Or-love, 16, of Hollywood, a junior at St. Andrew's School in Boca Raton.

-- "It's our duty as Jewish children to see what our ancestors went through," said Shaari Gross, 17, of Boca Raton, a senior at Spanish River High School in Boca Raton.

-- "It's important we learn what [the Holocaust) was all about," said Josh Zinns, 16, of Boca Raton, a junior at St. Andrew's, "so we [will be) able to tell other people what happened."

-- "I think we'll want to talk about it [afterward)," said Tova Heiney, 16, of Boca Raton, a junior at Hillel School in North Miami Beach. "It's kind of like sticking up for yourself."

Zinns agreed. "That's one of the things I'm looking forward to the most," he said.

That's one of the goals of the march, said Myrna Gross, chairman of the march's new Florida/South Region, which includes Palm Beach County north to Atlanta and west to New Orleans.

"You're being given a great responsibility to bear witness and never forget," Gross told the teens.

But the teens are also getting the resources to meet such a responsibility, said Leon Weissberg, director of education for the South Palm Beach County Jewish Federation, and director of the march's Florida/South Region.

"In another 20 years," after adult Holocaust survivors have passed away, "only you will be able to say, `Don't tell me it didn't happen. I was there to see [the camps),'" Weissberg told the teens.

Sponsors of the march include the South Broward Jewish Federation, the Jewish Federation of Greater Fort Lauderdale, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, and the South Palm Beach County Jewish Federation.

For more information about the March of the Living event, call 1-407-852-3308.